Δ KNOWLEDGEBASE
« Responding to Climate Change
Excerpt from In Search of Environmental Excellence:
Moving Beyond Blame
by Bruce Piasecki and Peter Asmus
CHAPTER 3
A Global Greenhouse: Framing the Debate
Page 2 of 14
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A person would be an economic fool to put money into a redwood seedling when so many more profitable opportunities are at hand.
— Garrett Hardin,
Professor of Ecology,
University of California-Santa Barbara
Six of the hottest years on record occurred in the 1980s.
As much energy leaks through American windows every year as flows through the Alaskan pipeline.
Tropical rain forests the size of the city of Philadelphia disappear every week.
These facts are linked by a common thread: global warming.1 This issue has captured the attention of government, industry, and private citizens alike, for the threat appears as dire and dramatic as the warnings of the Old Testament prophets. The record heat and drought of 1988 was the critical turning point in capturing the general public's attention; it forced some business leaders to recognize that the industrial world's long-standing dependence on fossil fuels and the consequent production of carbon dioxide, are changing the world's ability to regulate temperatures and sustain life. Industrial activity is indeed altering the face of the earth in ways far more consequential than most radical environmentalists dreamt possible in the 1960s and 1970s.2
The National Academy of Sciences in 1979 estimated that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations above preindustrial levels would raise the earth's temperature between 2.1° and 8.1° F.3 Within six years of this prediction, three major worldwide associations of scientists reconfirmed the seriousness of these estimates, including the International Council of Scientific Unions, the United Nations Environmental Program, and the prestigious World Meteorological Organization.
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Footnotes
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It is too early to gain any firm factual hold on the changes now called global warming, since most of these changes, even the experts admit, may never be fully known in advance. Four factors — clouds, oceans, solar cycles, and volcanoes — may serve to illustrate the remarkable complexity of global warming. "Clouds," admits expert V. Ramanathan of the University of Chicago, "are one of the largest sources of uncertainty." A warmer earth should mean more humidity, and thereby more clouds. But it is also thought that clouds could cool things off by increasing the reflection of solar energy. So it is hard to predict which effect might dominate a cloudier world.
Oceans are massive heat absorbers, but just how long they can delay the full onset of global warming is still hotly debated. Volcanoes cool the earth's overall surface, but no one can predict when the big ones will erupt. And solar cycles show that, while many believe the sun's output is constant, it's not. Brightness, for instance, diminished about 0.1 percent from 1979 to 1984.
How clouds, oceans, volcanoes, and sun cycles interact is still an untold story, more like a Brahms symphony than a science.
Most experts agree, however, that the policies being pursued to combat global warming — the saving of the rain forest, greater energy efficiency, and less fossil-fuel use — are useful and needed policy initiatives regardless of whether the world is cooling or warming. These policies should be viewed as an insurance policy for future generations. [« back]
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The record heat of 1988 simply replaced the previous record set in 1987. The years 1981 and 1983 tied for third-warmest, with 1980 and 1986 in fifth and six places, respectively. These records hold for all recorded weathers in history. [« back]
- "The combined atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases since 1860," notes Irving M. Mintzer of the World Resources Institute, "are believed to have already committed the earth's surface to warm approximately 0.5° to 1.5° C. above the average global temperature of the pre-industrial period." This doesn't sound like much, but actually represents an astonishing amount of released heat. A change in average global temperature of only 1° C. separates today's climate regime from that of the "little ice age" period of the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries in Europe and North America. So the increase of 2.1° to 8.1° F. (which is 1.5° to 4.5° C.) represents a massive increase atop the already noted changes. [« back]
